Abstract

Global politics is blighted by frustrated needs for transformation (Scoones et al. 2015), but it is also invigorated by the associated hopes. Either way, the many widely acknowledged (but persistently neglected) imperatives centre around poverty and oppression, inequality and injustice, climate change, ecological destruction, toxic pollution, nuclear risks and all the obscenity and waste of war (UNESCO/ICSU 2009; UNEP 2012; Griggs et al. 2013; UN 2013; UNDP 2013). Despite the formidable material drivers, every one of these scourges is socially constituted. And — although progress remains painfully slow at best — history shows all to be politically remediable. So, each imperative presents a defining challenge, spanning all the multivalent aspirations and possibilities for what might count as ‘human progress’. What then could be more compelling as focal priorities — equally in the knowing and the doing of ‘governance’.